The Observatory Science Centre at Herstmonceux

East Sussex, United Kingdom

10:58 PM, UTC

Two minutes before The Blink

Illuminated only by the ruby red glow of astronomy lamps, a group of twenty-one tourists wandered between the observatory’s public telescopes with their eyes fixed on the stars above them. For those who came from the surrounding cities, this was their first time seeing more than a handful of stars in the night sky. One family had even made the trip from London for their chance to see the stars up close and personal, and simply being able to see the Milky Way spanning the sky had been a source of complete astonishment for them. As the student host of the night’s public astronomy event, Becca Simmons loved nothing more than to show people just how beautiful the firmament really was.

Most of this beauty was due to the Observatory Science Centre’s remote location all the way out in Herstmonceux, which meant light pollution from cities didn’t have the chance to wash out the night’s darkness. Phones also were forbidden on the grounds, which forced people to focus on what was in front of them. But more than that, Becca thought the sky had particularly lived up to its designation of “heaven” tonight, not just the result of the observatory’s remoteness, but of perfectly cloudless weather, a waxing half-moon still far beneath the horizon, and stable, non-turbulent atmospheric temperatures. Getting all three of these conditions at the same time was like hitting all 7s in an astronomical slot machine—in the year or so Becca had worked as an assistant for the observatory, she had only seen such conditions one other time. The fact she was able to host such a perfect viewing night for her final astronomy event before the semester started made her feel like she really had hit the jackpot.

Then again, just being able to work for an observatory was a jackpot all on its own. With a year left in her undergraduate, Becca was beyond fortunate to have landed the position at such an esteemed astronomical institution. It had started as a simple job shadowing opportunity but, thanks to a good word from her mentor at the university, the staff at the Science Centre had been open to accepting her as a member of the team. An assistant paid only in work experience, of course, but it meant she was part of the Centre’s family and could therefore use the facility whenever she wanted, free of charge. She’d spent countless nights beneath the stars in this very viewing area, her only company the telescope her parents had bought her and a playlist of classical music streaming through her earbuds. Nights like those made her feel like she stood in a cathedral the size of the universe, completely alone but somehow not lonely, as if God himself had silently wandered onto the yard just behind her to take a good look at his creation.

As incredible as those sacred midnight masses were, they didn’t compare to the public astronomy nights the observatory hosted. These were the nights Becca shined as brightly as Sirius, nights when she watched people who had never given the sky a second thought realize the true scale of their unconsidered universe. Children, teenagers, adults—everyone had a specific moment during these nights when it all clicked for them. The children were always amazed at simply arriving at the observatory and seeing the large telescopes, but their parents took a bit more to wow. So many parents expected a night of fun for their little ones and ended up so much more involved in the event than they had believed possible, and the sight of grown adults cutting ahead of their own children to see the rings of Saturn one more time was absolutely priceless.

“Mommy, I can’t see it anymore.” A little girl no older than six leaned away from the telescope’s eyepiece and frowned.

“Well, did you touch it?” Her mother asked. “The scientist lady said if you touch it, it might mess it up.”

The girl’s eyes widened. “But I didn’t touch it!”

Long familiar with the dangerous combination of children and fine-tuned telescopes, Becca approached the two and smiled. “Hi there! Having problems?”

The girl’s mother offered an apologetic smile. “Sorry, I think she must have bumped it while looking.”

“I did not!”

“It’s no problem,” Becca said, kneeling down in front of the girl. “This is a magic telescope. It can automatically find anything in the universe and point itself in the right place. All you have to do is press a button and it does the rest, just like that.”

The girl seemed amazed by this concept and watched eagerly as Becca punched buttons on the small control box. A display went through the recalibration process and Becca locked the telescope onto Polaris, the North Star, and the computer calculated precisely where every other celestial body was in the night sky just from its own specific time and location. Motors slowly turned the telescope to compensate for the Earth’s rotation, making anything it locked onto sit perfectly still within the center of the eyepiece, no constant adjustments necessary.

Once the computer was recalibrated, Becca looked to the girl’s mother. “Do you know what it was pointed at?”

She thought for a second. “I think it—”

“Mars!” the little girl half shouted. “I was looking at Mars.”

Her mother frowned. “I thought you said you didn’t see anything.”

“No, I said I can’t see it anymore. First it was a red circle, then it went black.”

Becca smiled again. “Mars it is.” She typed on the small keyboard and pressed the GO button, and the telescope swiveled around to a point just above the eastern horizon. Looking up, Becca could see Jupiter and the Pleiades cluster shining near where the telescope stopped, but she didn’t see the familiar red twinkle of the god of war. She peered into the eyepiece, but there was nothing there. “Huh.”

The girl’s mother sighed. “Please tell me she didn’t break it.”

“She didn’t,” Becca said, checking the display again and hoping that was the truth. Yes, the computer showed that the scope was aimed at Mars, only there was nothing in the eyepiece but darkness. Wherever Mars was, it wasn’t where the computer thought it was. Had she not looked at Mars herself just before everyone showed up for the event? Becca thought so. She did every other time she hosted. It was always helpful to have a list of which planets were visible so people would know what they would be able to see. Mars had been on that list, Becca was almost positive, and she could have sworn she had looked at it through this very telescope.

She threw a quick grin at the girl, who had suddenly become very nervous at the idea she had broken this magic telescope. “It’s probably just a glitch in the tracking computer. What else do you want to look at?”

“Ummmmm . . . Saturn! WAIT!” She froze, looking terrified. “That’s the one with the ring, yes?”

Becca nodded.

The girl exhaled as if she had just narrowly avoided death. “OK, good. Yes. Saturn.”

“Onward to Saturn!” Becca entered the planet into the controller and the telescope’s motor whirred, panning southward until it stopped at the bright point of light she knew to be Saturn. Saturn was always a crowd favorite, and as Becca looked through the eyepiece to make sure her telescope was still functioning, she was reminded of why that was. The gas giant appeared small and tan through the telescope, no bigger than a marble, but the tilted rings that stuck out from both sides made it look like something that shouldn’t have been able to exist. Almost like something made with CGI. It was too perfect and beautiful to be real, and despite having studied those rings with her own telescope for the better part of a year now, she still couldn’t understand how something so enormous and majestic had been hanging there for billions of years, nothing more than another bright dot in the sky to anything on Earth that had evolved eyes, completely unknown for what it truly looked like until a man named Galileo pointed his telescope at it four hundred years ago and showed the world what he saw.

That was a long time to be all alone in the dark.

A tiny hand pulled at Becca’s sleeve. “Is it broken?”

“No,” Becca said to the girl, stepping away from the telescope and shaking the stardust out of her head. “It’s beautiful.”

The girl squealed and rushed toward the eyepiece, nearly vibrating with excitement.

“Don’t touch the telescope,” her mother hissed.

“WOW! I see it!” She pulled away from the eyepiece and looked from Becca to her mother, her mouth hanging open. Then she dove back in for another glimpse. “Mommy, you have to look! You can really see it!”

The woman approached the telescope in that sheepish sort of way Becca saw parents do so often at these events, like they were embarrassed to be looking through a telescope clearly intended to be entertaining for small children. “Alright, alright.” She placed her eye over the eyepiece and adjusted her head in an attempt to see the planet. “Don’t touch—” She gasped, her hand moving to rest gently against the side of the telescope. “Oh.”

Becca smiled. There it was. The click. She doubted that the little girl had wrapped her mind around just how far away Saturn was from her and how large and vast that cold and empty space in between was, or that she had arrived at the next logical thought of how incomprehensibly small that meant she and everything she knew was, but the woman had. Even if she’d only been partially paying attention during Becca’s fun facts and Q&A session, the woman was now in total awe at seeing with her own two eyes something that had previously only existed in movies and textbooks. Saturn was real now, not just an abstract idea to take on some scientist’s word alone, and Becca had been the one to show the both of them what it looked like.

In a way, she was just like Galileo.

“Mommy,” the little girl said, impatiently crossing her arms, “you said not to touch the telescope.”

---

At midnight, Becca called for everyone’s attention for the event’s closing remarks. This was always the worst part of astronomy nights. Telling a crowd of people who had just fallen in love with the universe that they couldn’t see it anymore was never a fun job. But the Science Centre had to shut down for the night, at least for the public. The facility was scheduled to be used by some researchers arriving from the university sometime after midnight, and having a gaggle of small children screaming and running across the grounds was typically seen as a hindrance to science.

Becca thanked everyone for attending the event and apologized for her earlier error in telling them that Mars would be visible tonight (a mistake she still couldn’t believe she had made). She reminded everyone of the next astronomy night the following week but didn’t mention that she would be returning to her own university in two days to finish out her final year of study, meaning she wouldn’t be back here to host at least until Christmas break in December. Nobody had any last questions for Becca, and when she ended her speech with a final thank you to the crowd, they clapped and applauded her. The little girl and her mother even pulled her to the side as everyone else walked back to their cars and thanked Becca for her patience and help. It was nothing, Becca said, smiling at how sincere the woman sounded.

But as the sound of cars starting up filled the night, Becca felt that familiar pang of sadness she always felt at watching them leave. Some of these people wouldn’t be back to another astronomy night for the rest of their lives, regardless of how amazed they were by what they had seen. Some people just didn’t care about the stars and planets, even after seeing them up close. They weren’t affected by them, weren’t moved by them the way Becca was. Their eyes would drop back to the ground and remain there, and they wouldn’t think of ever lifting them back up again.

But others would be back. Maybe not to this specific observatory, but some of them would find another place to get their dose of the heavens or go mad from withdrawal. It would most likely be one of the children dragging their parents back to see Saturn or Jupiter again, though Becca knew most of the parents were only pretending to be reluctant. She suspected it was actually the other way around. Four days from now, the kids would have forgotten all about telescopes and starry skies and the endless universe until their parents, far too embarrassed to admit that they themselves wanted another turn at the telescope, would subtly nudge them into wanting to go back. Becca imagined them arranging the spaghetti and meatballs at dinner to resemble a certain ringed planet that their child would undoubtedly recognize, incepting the idea into their heads until one thought led to another and the child demanded to go back to see the planets for real, a demand that would be very seriously debated and eventually agreed upon but only if you’re a good little girl for the rest of the week. Never mind the fact that Daddy reserved tickets for the next astronomy night two days earlier.

Becca didn’t understand why so many people were like that, why finding joy in curiosity and learning was seen as something reserved only for children and never adults.

When the last car pulled out of the parking lot and Becca found herself finally alone, she looked up to the night sky and lost herself in the stars. There were so many tonight. The cloudy band of the Milky Way was brighter than she’d ever remembered seeing it before, and each star shone with white-hot intensity, almost like the universe was giving her one final and perfect night at the observatory. She tore her eyes away from the view and returned to her telescope. She still didn’t understand what was wrong with the tracking computer. Again, Becca entered Mars into the keyboard and watched the telescope swivel away from Saturn and stop at the empty patch of darkness to the east. “Mars located,” it informed her, yet there was nothing to see. She double-checked that the telescope’s geographic location was set right, which it was, double-checked that the display’s clock matched the 12:19:38 that her watch showed, which it did, double-checked that the calibration point was set to the North Star, which it was. Everything was right except for Mars. It was almost as if the planet had just . . . disappeared.

“Or your tracking computer is wrong,” Becca muttered. Simplest explanations and all that. She’d never heard of one miscalculating a single planet’s orbit while getting everything else right, though, but what else could it be?

As Becca tried to recall if she really had seen Mars earlier that night or if she was just too tired to remember, a car pulled into the parking lot and killed its engine. She didn’t notice it, nor did she notice the sound of the door closing and then running footsteps quickly drawing closer.

But the tracking computer couldn’t be wrong. It had perfectly tracked all the other planets and stars in the sky with no problem. All of them but Mars. How was that possible? If it pinpointed one planet, it had to be right.

Then Becca remembered that other quote so many in the scientific community loved saying. She thought Sherlock Holmes had been the one to say it: “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Only in this case, the only thing she that remained was impossible. Wasn’t it? Planets didn’t just disappear.

“Becca!” A man’s voice pulled her out of her thoughts and she realized with a start that he was shouting her name from halfway across the yard.

She jumped to her feet and looked toward him, then frowned at the sight of the lead astronomer of the observatory sprinting toward her. “Dr. Jameson? What are you—”

“Jupiter!” The old scientist stopped beside the telescope and rested his hands on his knees, breath coming in ragged gasps. “Quickly!”

Becca did as he said and entered the planet into the telescope’s computer. The motors whirred to life and panned across the sky. “I’m afraid my tracker has been on the fritz tonight. Keeps saying that Mars—”

“Jupiter!” Dr. Jameson wheezed. “Look. Now!”

Again, Becca did as he said. She looked through the eyepiece as the storm-banded sphere of Jupiter filled her vision. She could see the Great Red Spot down at the bottom and several of the gas giant’s brightest moons twinkling in the black. “I have it. What am I looking for?”

“Right now, Jupiter is 750,000,000 kilometers out, give or take.” Becca knew from his whispered tone that he was talking to himself more than to her, running some kind of complicated calculation in his head but allowing her to follow his math if she could keep up. “Light travels at 18,000,000 kilometers per minute. Dividing that means . . .” he trailed off for a moment, “sunlight takes roughly 41 and a half minutes to reach Jupiter at its current location from the Sun. So that would mean the Sun’s last light should reach it right around 11:34.”

Becca frowned and looked back at the astronomer. “The Sun’s last—”

“Keep looking!” Dr. Jameson snapped. “Do not look away until it’s gone.”

“W-What do you mean gone?” Becca fixed her eye back over the eyepiece where Jupiter’s red and tan glow once more greeted her. She could hear Dr. Jameson turning pages in something, but he ignored her question.

“Jupiter is approximately 862,400,000 kilometers from Earth right now, so the sunlight reflected to us from Jupiter would take another . . . 47 minutes to bounce back to us. Meaning our last view will be at 12:21. And it is currently . . . 12:20. So we have less than a minute left.”

Fear prickled up her spine and for a moment she wondered if all the sleepless nights Dr. Jameson had spent in the observatory’s main lab had finally sent him over the edge. He had never so much as raised his voice to her before. “A minute until what? Please, I don’t understand.”

“Is your telescope set to record for tonight?” he asked, his voice strangely quiet.

“Yes.”

“Good.” She could hear him lie back on the grass and exhale. “That’s good. Just keep your eye on Jupiter. You’ll be able to say that you were watching when it went dark, that you saw it happen with your own two eyes.”

Mind running wild with questions, Becca stared at Jupiter’s largeness, eyes moving over raging storm systems larger than the Earth that swirled along its entire visible surface, over the four tiny pinpricks of light surrounding it that were the four Jovian moons. Through the rising heatwaves in Earth’s atmosphere the gas giant named after Zeus, god of all gods, king of all planets, appeared to briefly shimmer, looking like some kind of ghostly specter wavering there in the darkness.

And then it disappeared.